


Hungry Eyes

by daytripper14



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: College AU, F/M, I don't know what I'm doing, M/M, post-capsicle, pre-Iron Man armor, tony/pepper exes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-05-23 03:56:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6104047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daytripper14/pseuds/daytripper14
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony Stark had already done the whole college thing, and he was so over it. His father, on the other hand, expected greatness, and was making his son go to graduate school, so Tony moved to Los Angeles to obtain two Master's degrees in physics and electrical engineering from UCLA. This story is about the misadventures of one boy in the city of angels, and what happens when he meets a certain legendary super soldier for a slice of pizza.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How You Call Your Lover Boy?

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title based off "Love is Strange" by Mickey & Sylvia.

Tony Stark had already done the whole college thing, and he was so over it. As far as he was concerned, double majoring in physics and electrical engineering at MIT, graduating in only three years at the age of eighteen, and coming out the other side with a perfect 4.0 was good enough. His father, though, was an entirely different story. Howard wasn't willing to settle for good enough; no, he expected greatness, and was threatening disownment if Tony didn't pursue a graduate degree. Not that Tony believed him–after all, it would bring a lot of bad press down on Howard and the company–but he would rather avoid a future filled with bitter arguments and icy silent treatments. He much preferred their standard of mutually ignoring each other. So, instead of jetting off to Amsterdam to thoroughly enjoy its legendary red light district, Tony packed his bags and moved into a luxury penthouse just a few feet from the Santa Monica Pier, 30 minutes from the UCLA campus, depending on traffic (and he had the luxury of not giving a shit about traffic–that's what his personal driver was for). All that was left, then, was for him to show up to his first class, a graduate seminar in electrical engineering, at 1 PM on Monday.

Which almost didn't happen. Because, when he woke up at noon, he seemed to be suffering from a terribly painful hangover and almost immediately started throwing up. Because _fuck_. On the bright side, there was a notable lack of any anonymous woman in his bed, so that was one less thing for him to deal with.

Flinching at the movement, Tony reached for his phone and texted his personal assistant, Pepper Potts.

**Tony Stark: SOS. Hangover.**

Tony had met Pepper back in Massachusetts, where she had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a double major in Business and Legal Studies, finishing the same year as Tony when she was 21. The two of them had crossed paths a few times over the years while walking the streets of Cambridge. Finally, during his third and final year at MIT, Tony decided to introduce himself to her. They were fast friends, despite the fact that Pepper intimidated him just a little bit. He was attracted to her self-confidence and to the way her presence demanded the attention of every person in a room. It wasn't long until they started sleeping together, because neither was looking for a serious commitment, and both were forces of nature unwilling to slow down for another person. They understood each other pretty well. So they had fun, and they used sex to blow off some steam. When they graduated and Tony was preparing to move across the country, he realized he couldn't leave Pepper behind. In all honesty, he probably wouldn't survive a day without her. It was only because of Pepper that he ate on any semblance of a regular basis. She would also be invaluable for dealing with the press and helping to manage the responsibilities for Stark Industries that Howard was already starting to give his son. And...she was probably his best friend, and he wanted to keep her around.

In early June, Tony called his father to talk about hiring himself a PA. He especially played up the potential for greater accountability and the training it would provide in delegation and oversight. After some more convincing from Pepper herself, who could charm the pants off of Stalin if she wanted to, Howard agreed to hire her, and she moved to California right alongside her new boss. They stopped sleeping together–new place, new start and all that–and Pepper settled into her job as if she was made for it. The few employees Tony already had already loved her enough to follow her off a cliff if called for. Tony, on the other hand...

Tony swore he could hear her sigh through the text she sent back.

**Pepper Potts: I'll be there in 5. Take a shower. Don't do anything stupid before I get there.**

Groaning, he rolled out of bed, and, eyes kept firmly shut, made his way to the bathroom using a path he had only vaguely memorized. Needless to say, his knees were going to be rather bruised, and not in the fun way. Tony finally found the shower, turned the temperature up as hot as he could handle, stumbled in, and sat down with his head between his knees, letting the water run over him and breathing through the steam. Which is how Pepper found him exactly five minutes from the time she sent her text.

"You know, this is ostensibly not what you hired me to do, so this better not become a routine." Tony moaned. "Alright, she sighed as she switched the water off. Pepper grabbed Tony's plush towel and wrapped it around his shoulders, then turned and walked out of the room, heels briefly clacking on the tile until the bedroom carpet muffled the sound.

Pepper called back to him a minute later, "Come on Tony, I brought coffee and Excedrin." With one last pitiful moan, Tony peeled himself off the floor. He clutched the towel more tightly around his shoulders, savoring the warmth, then wrapped it around his waist (after all, Tony Stark would _never_ allow himself to be indecent before a lady.).

Twenty minutes later, Pepper was kicking Tony's sorry ass out the door and into the black Range Rover parked on the street. His chauffeur, Happy, was waiting inside, and greeted his charge with a smile and a nod. Tony, for his part, had wanted a limo to drive him to school, but had been denied on the basis that it would be "inconvenient" or "flashy" or some such bullshit.

Tony himself had packed nothing more than his laptop in his sleek black messenger bag, but he noticed that Pepper must have discreetly slipped in a power bar and a banana. For the millionth time so far that day, he thanked whatever higher power or noodle god or whatever for sending him Pepper.

There was traffic, of course, but nothing too ridiculous, and he reached UCLA a full ten minutes before his seminar was supposed to start. Dark sunglasses glued to his nose, and giving his hair one last fluff to achieve its ideal just-rolled-out-of-bed look, Tony stepped out of the car for his first day of graduate school.


	2. From Scratch

Tony was not loving Los Angeles. Sure the beaches were nice, but there were beaches on the East Coast, too, and they didn't come with this ungodly heat. And, he had learned, there was nothing he hated more than heat. If only he could buy weather and dismantle the heat setting.

Other than that, it was...okay. His classes were a huge waste of his time. He'd determined by the end of the first day, after skimming through all of his syllabi and reading materials, that he already knew everything they were supposedly "teaching" him. In fact, he'd implemented all of this crap and more when he built the first iteration of DUMM-E when he was just eight years old. He skipped class most days.

Instead, he spent his time creating a new lab for himself out of an empty warehouse. Pepper learned pretty quickly that if Tony wasn't in his room, passed out after a long night of drinking and with someone else in his bed, he was in his workshop. The first time she found him there, she asked why he didn't just pay someone to come in and clean the place up. It's not like he didn't have enough money.

Tony stopped painting the wall mid-brush stroke and stared at Pepper while he thought. He wasn't exactly the blue collar, hard labor type, so why was he working so hard on this? He'd been asking himself that question since the first moment he began power-washing the dirty old warehouse. He was bored and restless, and that was undoubtedly part of it, but there was something more. It wasn't until a few years later–after _a lot_ of therapy–that Tony understood the answer. Because of his name, most people just gave him whatever he wanted. Sex, booze, major ass-kissing, etc. He never really had to prove himself to anyone, because everyone already had preconceived assumptions about him and his greatness, or his arrogance, or his genius, or his entitlement. When he built his workshop from scratch, he finally started to prove his worth to himself.

At the time, though, all he knew was that something inside him just felt at peace while he created something from nothing. Tony gave Pepper a small smile and said, "If you want something done right, do it yourself, right? Besides, I want this place to be just mine."

Pepper shrugged, and the two of them made small talk for a few minutes. For the first and only time, she thanked him for hiring her as his assistant, which took Tony by surprise. With him as her boss, she explained, she was basically solely in charge of his portion of Stark Industries, and she was loving it. He appreciated that she wanted so much responsibility and didn't find all the paperwork and yelling at people and more paperwork as horrifyingly boring as he did. Mostly, though, he was just happy she was happy.

~•~•~•~

As it turned out, Pepper loved coffee. Like, a lot. She spent quite a bit of her free time searching for the best coffee in Los Angeles, until one day she stumbled upon a cute little hole in the wall with huge comfy chairs and a cappuccino so creamy and rich it made her knees weak. It was the perfect place to discuss business. Or, so she said.

Tony, for his part, just wanted to go back to sleep. _Why the fuck did I hire a person who willingly wakes up at 5 AM as my assistant? What the fuck were you thinking Stark?_

There was some crisis that was causing a hubbub because something or other would cause the stocks to drop. That was about as much as Tony was able to catch in his barely awake state.

He touched Pepper's hand lightly and said, "Pepper, listen. I trust you to handle this. This is what you were made for. If anyone calls for me, tell them you have my express permission to speak on my behalf. If I need to sign anything–" He reached for her stack of notepads and legal documents and grabbed a blank piece of paper, scribbling on it then handing it back. "–forge my signature. Now, I just want to go back to sleep."

Pepper, slightly taken aback, stared at him as he ranted. She raised her eyebrows.

"Fine. But, since I'm doing your work for you, you're staying right here and keeping me company. If you're going back to sleep, you're sleeping in that chair. I'd also appreciate a cappuccino."

Tony heaved himself out of the chair, then ordered Pepper's drink, which a perky blonde barista delivered a couple of minutes later. She batted her eyelashes at him, he winked, she giggled and walked away. Typical. She'd spend the rest of the day throwing seductive glances his way and, if he was bored enough, he might take her home with him.

He settled into his chair, closed his eyes, and fell asleep within a minute. He wasn't sure how long he was asleep before the chimes of the front door startled him awake. Tony glanced toward the door, where he saw the second to last person he would ever want to see: Steve Rogers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, sorry for taking like 80 years to post this chapter. I promise I am inspired by this story and am working on it and thinking about it all the time. Thank you to everyone that enjoyed the last chapter!
> 
> Next chapter, we'll see some more interaction between Steve and Tony! Stay tuned...


	3. Oh, say, can you see it's Captain America

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out this AU Steve's backstory.

For the record, the absolute last person Tony would want to see was his father, but _Captain fucking America_ was a close goddamn second. A huge reason he had been in such a hurry to move across the country was to escape Howard's constant demeaning comparisons between Tony, his disappointment of a son, and the scientific miracle (who may as well have walked on water as far as Howard was concerned) that was Steven Grant Rogers. And now, though his father was thousands of miles away, just where Tony liked him, and though he thought he was finally free, the paragon himself happened to walk into the exact coffee shop Tony was in and ruin everything. _SHIT. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit._

Howard had been been beyond thrilled when they found the Captain a few months back, just before Tony graduated from MIT. Once again, he had been one-upped by a guy that had been frozen for over fifty years. His father didn't even show up to the graduation ceremony–he'd been too busy meeting his long lost friend for coffee.

Tony had heard the story countless times. Steve Rogers was an experimental super soldier created during the Cold War and dubbed "Captain America." He was intended to be the face of anti-communist propaganda. When the Allies won World War II, he was only five years old–the image of American flags flying triumphantly and declaring the victory of freedom had been forever burned into his mind. It was then that he knew his calling was to fight to defend the values on which the United States was founded. But he was sick. Very, very sick. Asthma was among the least of his worries, but it was enough to bar him from joining the army when he turned eighteen. Had he not encountered Dr. Erskine, Steve would undoubtedly have died within a few years.

As it happened, he did meet Dr. Erskine, a German scientist participating in an exchange program with the US to promote goodwill between the former enemies. The doctor had been developing his super soldier serum for over forty years. His only other trial had resulted in a disaster: Red Skull. By the time Steve met Erskine, Red Skull and his Hydra was little more than a legend, but Steve knew the organization had wreaked major havoc during World War II, and nobody was sure where it had gone. The scientist told Steve that, if the serum worked (and he was fairly certain it would), he would become the best soldier in history and be able to fight for his country for a long, long time. Steve didn't even need to think before he said yes, absolutely. Erskine died two days later of a massive heart attack, before he could create more super soldiers.

After the serum, he toured the country spreading anti-communist propaganda for almost a year, little more than a dancing circus monkey. Finally, though, the army called on him. There were rumors of Hydra activity deep in Russia, and the government was unwilling to spend money and manpower on sending an army to the USSR when so much of the military was occupied with Vietnam. Instead, they sent Steve and the "Howling Commandos," an oddball group of highly advanced soldiers, which included Steve's childhood friend, Bucky Barnes. It was around this time that Steve and Howard, the young genius, became friends, as Howard created Captain America's costume and shield and donated high-tech weapons to the cause.

Howard flew the men to the Soviet Union in a small private plane. On the way, an air battle resulted in Bucky's sudden death when he fell out of a hole in the plane. Steve and the rest of the Howling Commandos crash-landed in the middle of Siberia, with Cap left emotionally devastated. They conducted guerrilla attacks on Hydra bases across the country, wiping out a large portion of the resurgence. In their last attack, though, only a few weeks after his best friend died, Steve was trapped in the basement of a Hydra bunker when it exploded. His team stayed for a few days to search through the wreckage, but they could not find him. He was just twenty-one years old. Throughout the United States, people held candlelight vigils, televisions proudly displayed the President's commemorative speech, and the news praised the good deeds of Captain Steve Rogers.

Fifty-four years later, the US President sanctioned a search party, largely due to the continuing urgings of Howard Stark, to thoroughly scour the wreckage site. It was miraculous that the team was able to find anything at all, let alone that they found a body, which they quickly realized belonged to Captain America. Solemnly, the group carried him back to the plane that had delivered them to Siberia. Nobody could have guessed that the medical crew would detect a weak pulse that grew stronger as they thawed him. Steve was scientifically impossible, and yet, here he was, in the same coffee shop as Tony Stark.

Fuck.

Tony watched spitefully as the American hero cheerfully held the door open for another customer, then walked up to the cash register and gave the girl a charming smile that could rival Tony's. She giggled. That was too much. First, Steve Rogers steals Tony's father and his childhood. Now he was going to steal his girl? Unacceptable. Five minutes ago, she had been batting her eyelashes at _him._

It made it worse that he was so genuinely good and so damn innocent. Even as Tony seethed, he knew to his core that Steve didn't even realize that he'd ruined his life. It would be so much easier to hate him if hew as an ass, but, of course, he wasn't, because he was Captain fucking America, protector of freedom and justice. Fucking hell.

Then a very important question occurred to him–why was Steve here? As far as Tony and the rest of the world knew, he was in New York working with S.H.I.E.L.D. Maybe he was only in town for a few days. Hopefully.

Tony's stomach dropped when Steve turned away from the counter and made eye contact with him. _He probably doesn't even know who I am, don't freak out._ But Steve gave him that big charming smile, waved, and walked over as if they were going to have a friendly chat. _Please._

"Hey, you're Tony Stark, right? Howard's son?" Tony glared at him for a moment; then, without deigning to respond, he spoke to Pepper.

"Pepper, I'm leaving now. I'll see you later." With that, he turned his back on Captain America and walked out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this chapter is just word vomit??? I wanted to do my best to sort of rewrite the first Cap movie to fit with this universe very concisely. You may have noticed that some things were very vague (hint: Bucky). It's because I'm planning on getting more into it later! This rundown of Steve's story is basically what the average person in America/the world would know about him. Thanks for sticking with me! Soon I'll have more time to devote to making this story not just word vomit. As always, if anyone has any suggestions or comments or questions or whatever, please ask in the comments! I'd love to hear from you. I also want to just really thank everyone who's clicked on this story or left kudos or bookmarked it or anything. I'm really having fun writing this, and seeing that people enjoy it so far is amazing.


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